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So I've had a pretty sizable issue going on at home that I cannot seem to wrap my brain around and is starting to become a massive headache. I'll get my home network specs out of the way so everyone knows what I'm dealing with.
At my house we're running off Cox broadband, nothing special just normal cable interweb 20mbp/s down, 3-5mbp/s upload. My roommates upstairs are hardwired to my WRT54GL running Tomato firmware 1.21(just saw there's another new version 1.23 out, need to try it). My roommate is running Vista Ultimate x64, his girlfriend on XP Pro. I am in the basement connecting via another WRT54GL also running tomato configured as a wireless bridge running 1.18 firmware. I am also running Vista Ultimate x64.
Here's where things get a little weird, about a month ago when I saw that new firmware was out for tomato(v1.19) I decided to upgrade. Everything went pretty smooth, as expected my main router seemed to take the upgrade just fine. Cool I thought, and went off to work at my second job. About an hour before I head home I get a call from my roommate wondering what's up with the net, he said he can get on but his old lady cannot. At this time we had her connecting wirelessly with a PCI card(older DLink wireless G). So I figure that's strange since I tested her box out and it was working just fine before I left, but probably just needs to be re-connected. My rommie is pretty good with computers and I walked him through the various things off the top of my head(disconnecting/ reconnecting, repairing, rebooting, and power cycling the network(router and cable modem) without any improvement. So I figure "hell I'll be home shortly, I can figure it out then". I checked all my router settings and everything looked pretty normal, I disabled wireless security on the network to save me the headache that there might be some protocol incompatibility since it was an older wireless card. Still no big response, XP would still see the network, connect and not report any problems. The only difference now was it would allow her PC to browse the net for a few minutes and then kick it off again(page cannot be displayed). My router downstairs would still connect with no issues. So I thought maybe the card took a dirtnap on a strange co-incidence, picked up a little belkin wireless usb device from officedepot to see if that made an impact. That worked for about 5 minutes and then would pull the same problem(connect for 5 minutes then nothing "page cannot be displayed". At this point I had already downgraded back to Tomato v1.18 with no success, no settings seemed to change in the router and I even reset to defaults and re-configured from scratch. My roommate said screw it at this point and picked up a 25' CAT5e from Wal-Mart or something and bam! she was back online.
Here's where things are driving me mad, now that her PC is online and working fine something else had to give. Like I said my buddy and I are both running Vista x64 and now were having connection issues. Especially if either of our PC's has been left alone for awhile, say you wake the system from screen saver and try and open firefox(or IE) you will not get a connection "page cannot be displayed". We both get this, and can both fix it by going to the "Network and Sharing Center" clicking "Manage Network Connections" and right-click "diagnose" on our LAN connections. Windows goes and disables/ re-enables the LAN and resets the IP. Poof! we're back in business for a few untill it does it again which it could be 5 minutes, hours or even days at this rate). Seems completely random, then I had this great idea that maybe Vista is trying to assign both our systems to the same IP address. Which sounds pretty close to what I am experiencing right? I tried setting my IPv4 protocol to a different(unused) IP and I thought that did it, for about 5-10 minutes and then it happened again! I double checked "ipconfig" on both his and my PC and we're definitely using different IP's but there still seems to be something missing. Is there any IPv6 issues that may cause an problems like this?
Also the stranger thing is once we do get connected we can pretty much stay connected if we do something intense online. It all happens at idle, my roommate is a sumbleupon junkie and will have connection problems all the time, but if he starts playing Lord of the Rings Online which is constantly sending and recieving packets then he'll have no issues. Same with me, not neccessarily right after I become idle could be 15 minutes and it'll happen but if i'm playing L4D, COD4 or LOTRO I have absolutly no problems. One of the first things I checked was the "power managment" options in Vista and both our PC's had our ethernet adapters set to "power off this device to increase efficiancy". I thought this was the issue right off the bat and unchecked the box but it also did not work.
So here I am now, looking for a nethead who might know something that I do not...
Any comments and suggestions are appreciated, and if you need more info ask away.
At my house we're running off Cox broadband, nothing special just normal cable interweb 20mbp/s down, 3-5mbp/s upload. My roommates upstairs are hardwired to my WRT54GL running Tomato firmware 1.21(just saw there's another new version 1.23 out, need to try it). My roommate is running Vista Ultimate x64, his girlfriend on XP Pro. I am in the basement connecting via another WRT54GL also running tomato configured as a wireless bridge running 1.18 firmware. I am also running Vista Ultimate x64.
Here's where things get a little weird, about a month ago when I saw that new firmware was out for tomato(v1.19) I decided to upgrade. Everything went pretty smooth, as expected my main router seemed to take the upgrade just fine. Cool I thought, and went off to work at my second job. About an hour before I head home I get a call from my roommate wondering what's up with the net, he said he can get on but his old lady cannot. At this time we had her connecting wirelessly with a PCI card(older DLink wireless G). So I figure that's strange since I tested her box out and it was working just fine before I left, but probably just needs to be re-connected. My rommie is pretty good with computers and I walked him through the various things off the top of my head(disconnecting/ reconnecting, repairing, rebooting, and power cycling the network(router and cable modem) without any improvement. So I figure "hell I'll be home shortly, I can figure it out then". I checked all my router settings and everything looked pretty normal, I disabled wireless security on the network to save me the headache that there might be some protocol incompatibility since it was an older wireless card. Still no big response, XP would still see the network, connect and not report any problems. The only difference now was it would allow her PC to browse the net for a few minutes and then kick it off again(page cannot be displayed). My router downstairs would still connect with no issues. So I thought maybe the card took a dirtnap on a strange co-incidence, picked up a little belkin wireless usb device from officedepot to see if that made an impact. That worked for about 5 minutes and then would pull the same problem(connect for 5 minutes then nothing "page cannot be displayed". At this point I had already downgraded back to Tomato v1.18 with no success, no settings seemed to change in the router and I even reset to defaults and re-configured from scratch. My roommate said screw it at this point and picked up a 25' CAT5e from Wal-Mart or something and bam! she was back online.
Here's where things are driving me mad, now that her PC is online and working fine something else had to give. Like I said my buddy and I are both running Vista x64 and now were having connection issues. Especially if either of our PC's has been left alone for awhile, say you wake the system from screen saver and try and open firefox(or IE) you will not get a connection "page cannot be displayed". We both get this, and can both fix it by going to the "Network and Sharing Center" clicking "Manage Network Connections" and right-click "diagnose" on our LAN connections. Windows goes and disables/ re-enables the LAN and resets the IP. Poof! we're back in business for a few untill it does it again which it could be 5 minutes, hours or even days at this rate). Seems completely random, then I had this great idea that maybe Vista is trying to assign both our systems to the same IP address. Which sounds pretty close to what I am experiencing right? I tried setting my IPv4 protocol to a different(unused) IP and I thought that did it, for about 5-10 minutes and then it happened again! I double checked "ipconfig" on both his and my PC and we're definitely using different IP's but there still seems to be something missing. Is there any IPv6 issues that may cause an problems like this?
Also the stranger thing is once we do get connected we can pretty much stay connected if we do something intense online. It all happens at idle, my roommate is a sumbleupon junkie and will have connection problems all the time, but if he starts playing Lord of the Rings Online which is constantly sending and recieving packets then he'll have no issues. Same with me, not neccessarily right after I become idle could be 15 minutes and it'll happen but if i'm playing L4D, COD4 or LOTRO I have absolutly no problems. One of the first things I checked was the "power managment" options in Vista and both our PC's had our ethernet adapters set to "power off this device to increase efficiancy". I thought this was the issue right off the bat and unchecked the box but it also did not work.
So here I am now, looking for a nethead who might know something that I do not...
Any comments and suggestions are appreciated, and if you need more info ask away.